Start up! The European Entrepreneurship Summit
Brussels, 21 February 2012
Patrick Duessel, Managing Director and Co-founder, Trifense
EIT finalist: Germany's Trifense fights the unknown cyber-threats
A Berlin spin-out, named as an EIT Awards finalist, takes a new approach to providing cyber security - and starts to gain traction in the market.
Protecting a company or organisation against known cyber-security threats is one thing; protecting them against unknown cyber-threats is quite another. But that is exactly the goal of Trifense, a Technical University of Berlin spin-out named as an EIT ICT Labs finalist for the EIT Awards.
“It is crucial for governments, operators of critical infrastructures such as utilities, and companies in all sorts of sectors from financial services to healthcare to be able to detect such risks and protect themselves against them,” said Trifense Managing Director and Co-founder Patrick Duessel. “A modern society can be vulnerable to pretty huge threats. Our technology can address this appropriately.”
Trifense’s self-learning technology allows models of “normality” to be learnt through incoming data known as network packet payloads. In this way, any deviation from the models can de detected and unknown cyber-threats entangled with the payloads can be recognised. The main difference between this and more traditional technology is that Trifense does not rely on any kind of pre-written description of the attack to spot the trouble coming. “This is a significant advantage over traditional network security solutions such as firewalls or signature-based systems,” Duessel said.
The company was founded in 2010, and in May 2011 Trifense secured its first customer, Astaro, an international network-security supplier, which is integrating Trifense’s technology into its own products.
When Duessel and his co-founders Christian Gehl and René Gerstenberger drew up their original business plan, integrating their technology into others’ products was not part of their thinking. The three computer scientists, who studied together at the University of Potsdam and later at the Fraunhofer Institute before the move to TU Berlin, had hoped to build their own hardware and sell directly to end-users. Talks with investors, however, highlighted the difficulty in raising enough money for such a plan and so they switched strategy to target companies like Astaro. “This cooperation is a big opportunity for us right now. It gives us hope that we’ll make it,” Duessel says.
Duessel is also encouraged by the interest from the German government. “IT security has a very high priority right now, and German politicians believe in the idea of Trifense. They take it seriously,” Duessel said.
Proof is in the awards that Trifense has picked up. For example, in 2010 it won a competition funded by the Federal Ministry for Economy and Technology for founders of innovative ICT companies, known as the ‘Gruenderwettbewerb IKT Innovativ’. In November 2011, the company was chosen for another ministry-supported initiative, the German Silicon Valley Accelerator programme. As a result of that selection, Duessel gets to spend a few months in early 2012 in Silicon Valley and seek out business opportunities there.
All this means that Duessel’s efforts are very much concentrated on developing and marketing the business, while the ongoing technology research is left to his colleagues. “I’d love to spend more time on the technical side. After all I’m a computer scientist,” says Duessel. “But it’s really interesting to get a company up and running. I wouldn’t want to miss out on this experience.”
Read more about this finalist: The Finalists - Just the Facts
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Organised in cooperation with the Science|Business Innovation Board |